Dude... Relax... Let's keep it cordial, please.
To the topic:
Any CS 101 student can implement an eventually consistent index on top of HBase.
The part that is always missed is: How do you keep it consistent?There you have
essentially two choices: (1) every update to an indexed table becomes a
distributed transaction or (2) you keep region server local indexes.
There is nothing wrong with #2. It's good for not-so-selective indexes.
There is also nothing wrong with #1. This one is good for highly selective
indexes (PK, etc)
Indexes and joins do not have to be conflated. And maybe your use case is fine
with eventually consistent indexes. In that case just write your stuff into two
tables and be done with it.
-- Lars
From: Michael Segel <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2015 8:14 AM
Subject: Re: Status of Huawei's 2' Indexing?
You’ll have to excuse Andy.
He’s a bit slow. HBASE-13044 should have been done 2 years ago. And it was
trivial. Just got done last month….
But I digress… The long story short…
HBASE-9203 was brain dead from inception. Huawei’s idea was to index on the
region which had two problems.
1) Complexity in that they wanted to keep the index on the same region server
2) Joins become impossible. Well, actually not impossible, but incredibly slow
when compared to the alternative.
You really should go back to the email chain.
Their defense (including Salesforce who was going to push this approach) fell
apart when you asked the simple question on how do you handle joins?
That’s their OOPS moment. Once you start to understand that, then allowing the
index to be orthogonal to the base table, things started to come together.
In short, you have a query either against a single table, or if you’re doing a
join. You then get the indexes and assuming that you’re only using the AND
predicate, its a simple intersection of the index result sets. (Since the
result sets are ordered, its relatively trivial to walk through and find the
intersections of N Lists in a single pass.)
Now you have your result set of base table row keys and you can work with that
data. (Either returning the records to the client, or as input to a map/reduce
job.
That’s the 30K view. There’s more to it, but once Salesforce got the basic
idea, they ran with it. It was really that simple concept that the index would
be orthogonal to the base table that got them moving in the right direction.
To Joseph’s point, indexing isn’t necessarily an RDBMS feature. However, it
seems that some of the Committers are suffering from rectal induced hypoxia.
HBASE-12853 was created not just to help solve the issue of ‘hot spotting’ but
also to get the Committers to focus on bringing the solutions that they glum on
in the client, back to the server side of things.
Unfortunately the last great attempt at fixing things on the server side was
the bastardization of coprocessors which again, suffers from the lack of
thought. This isn’t to say that allowing users to extend the server side
functionality is wrong. (Because it isn’t.) But that the implementation done in
HBase is a tad lacking in thought.
So in terms of indexing…
Longer term picture, there has to be some fixes on the server side of things to
allow one to associate an index (allowing for different types) to a base table,
yet the implementation of using the index would end up becoming a client. And
by client, it would be an external query engine processor that could/should sit
on the cluster.
But hey! What do I know?
I gave up trying to have an intelligent/civilized conversation with Andrew
because he just couldn’t grasp the basics. ;-)
> On Mar 13, 2015, at 4:14 PM, Andrew Purtell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> When I made that remark I was thinking of a recent discussion we had at a
> joint Phoenix and HBase developer meetup. The difference of opinion was
> certainly civilized. (smile) I'm not aware of any specific written
> discussion, it may or may not exist. I'm pretty sure a revival of HBASE-9203
> would attract some controversy, but let me be clearer this time than I was
> before that this is just my opinion, FWIW.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 3:58 PM, Rose, Joseph <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I saw that it was added to their project. I’m really not keen on bringing
>> in all the RDBMS apparatus on top of hbase, so I decided to follow other
>> avenues first (like trying to patch 0.98, for better or worse.)
>>
>> That Phoenix article seems like a good breakdown of the various indexing
>> architectures.
>>
>> HBASE-9203 (the ticket that deals with 2’ indexes) is pretty civilized (as
>> are most of them, it seems) so I didn’t know there were these differences
>> of opinion. Did I miss the mailing list thread where the architectural
>> differences were discussed?
>>
>>
>> -j
The opinions expressed here are mine, while they may reflect a cognitive
thought, that is purely accidental.
Use at your own risk.
Michael Segel
michael_segel (AT) hotmail.com
